Me and the kids went to a Bulls game tonight. I got some free tickets from work. Good seats too! Bulls played the Toronto Raptors and won 75 to 73. It was a pretty subdued game over all.

Behind us sat a drunk, loud Bulls fan. Wouldn’t have been a proper game without one I guess. What was most unsettling about this gentleman was that it was fairly obvious that he was a Jock in school. Went to collage and was now (I’m guessing) some sort of a VP in a company where he makes inappropriate comments to the women he works with and flirts with those who don’t yet hate his guts. His son is in collage and the “old man” was rooting for him to be partying and chasing women. He bragged to his friends about a few of his conquests in collage.

In my mind I conceived of him as the perfect American hedonist. Drinks too much, probably drives drunk but hasn’t been busted yet. Loves sports and spends more time and money on it than he does on his wife. Has a speedboat he takes out on Lake Michigan during the summer. He’s not very bright (despite the collage education) but he does well at work because he is pushy and knows how to take credit for those who work for him.

I felt sorry for him. He thinks he got it all but the alcohol and the sex and sports are masking what is really going on in him. He’s sad and lonely. He knows that something isn’t right but he would never admit that to anyone, especially not himself. He’s convinced that he is happy but why does he need the booze? Why can he not be content to have his wife only? What is he looking for that he lacks? He doesn’t know and worse he doesn’t know that he lacks it. Religion? That’s for weak people and women, not him. Go to Mass on Easter and Christmas and that’s enough of that. Except when the kids get married. The prayers and the priest all dressed up, they just leave him cold. He remembers how boring Mass was when he was a kid and he’s not going back to that.

This was all in my head and I might be completely wrong about him. I hope I am.

My son and I went to Best Buy and checked out Garage Band on a 20″ 1.25 GHz iMac. Wow. I want them both. Wow. No, really. Just ‘wow’.

Saw Lost in Translation tonight. Interesting movie. The pace was slow so it felt more like real life. Having been in Tokyo for a week I can say that it was authentic. Don’t know if I would recommend it or not.

I definitely had that “stranger in a strange land” feeling yesterday. I was listening to Marketplace and they started talking about NASCAR. NASCAR is foreign enough to me to begin with but it wasn’t the racing that got me. Marketplace is a finance program and so they were talking about the marketing of NASCAR. One wag said that NASCAR was “a business opportunity disguised as a sport.” Sponsorship is everything in NASCAR. It is how the fans can actually be involved. They talked to one man who used to drink Chocked Full ‘O Nuts coffee till Folgers started sponsoring his favorite driver so he switched to Folgers. Then Folgers dropped him and Maxwell House picked him up so the guy switched to Maxwell House. It wasn’t “he has it on his car so it must be cool”, no it was more crass. The fan felt that buying that product was helping his driver make money. Who cares that the coffee is crap.

Anyway, listening to all that made me feel very alien. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way that works. People spend money on things they may not be interested in because a rich car owner has charged that company tens of thousands of dollars to paint it on the car. And people think they’re participating by doing this. What a strange world we live in.

What? President Bush asked for only $1B for the Moon/Mars program?? That isn’t enough. The program is probably dead before it begins. I don’t think he’ll get the money for it unless he is careful about what districts he plans to involve in the program. Gotta keep those senators well fed or they get cranky. The Air Force was very good in doing this with the building of the B-2.

I had a dream yesterday and all I can remember is the phrase “Remember, you can’t say ‘toy’ before you go chubby!” What can this mean? Come to think of it, I don’t want to know.

I’m stoked about the rover on Mars. Even more so by the possibility of a future manned trip there. But something is bugging me about it too. The purpose is to see if Mars could have once supported life. Okay. Fair enough. If life exists on other planets, I think it would be cool to see how He did it there. What is brushing my fur the wrong way is that I suspect scientists are doing this in hopes of proving evolution.

If you read Carl Sagan’s book Contact (or see the movie for that matter) what you find out is that Sagan believed that the existence of life on another planet would show that evolution was a law and not a theory. Furthermore it appears that Sagan believed this revelation would send many/most of the religious people in the world over the edge. They would not be able to deal with it. Whatever.

So back on Earth, we’re throwing out judges who refuse to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments* and suspending kids who say “God bless” at the end of a broadcast on a public school radio station (insert your favorite “separation of church and state” story here) while at the same time we’re spending billions to help scientists prove their religion of evolution? I’m not saying that we should scrap the Mars missions, but I’m not sure if we need to go there to find out if Mars once supported life as much as we should be going to see if Mars can be made to support human life now. That’s right, we’re talking terraforming baby!

* I don’t agree with Judge Moore, I think he took it too far and took matters into his own hands when he defied a court order. There was more than just the Ten Commandments written on it, there was a reference to natural law or something like that. Still, I don’t believe the monument needed to be removed.

I’m going in tomorrow to drop Hebrew. I just squeaked by Elementary Hebrew I and when I sit down to study for E.H.II, I stress out so bad. Nothing looks familiar and I should know it. I’ll do E.H.I again in the fall. Instead, I’m hoping to take a class on Karl Barth taught by Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer. Either that or one on church history by Dr. Woodbridge. We’ll see.

Well, at least the Brits are. It’s all because of our schizophrenic way of handling Christmas. They get how ridiculous we look chasing any sign of religion out of the public life. Yes folks, this is American post-modernism at its finest.